How Not to React to Boston

With downtown Boston still an active crime scene, one of the leading anti-immigrant voices in Congress latched on to the marathon bombings as a reason to halt immigration reform.

According to National Review Online, Steve King, Republican of Iowa, thinks we need to pull the plug on reform — at least on the part that legalizes 11 million people — apparently because he heard reports that the authorities were questioning a Saudi man who was injured in one of the blasts.

An excerpt:

On immigration, King says national security should be the focus now, and any talk about a path to legalization should be put on hold. “We need to be ever vigilant,” he says. “We need to go far deeper into our border crossings. . . .We need to take a look at the visa-waiver program and wonder what we’re doing. If we can’t background check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where.”

Caution is always a good thing. But Mr. King’s reaction seems premature, doesn’t it? Reflexive, even? Dare we say paranoid? As The Times reported today:

“It was unclear Monday evening who might be responsible for the blast. Although investigators said that they were speaking to a Saudi citizen who was injured in the blast, several law enforcement officials took pains to note that no one was in custody.”

It’s safe to say that Mr. King was never going to support any immigration bill that legalized anybody. His views of immigrants lean toward fear and distrust; his solutions for the broken system rely on barricades and deportation.

His overreaction and call for inaction come at time of great hope for supporters of immigration reform. The first actual comprehensive-reform bill in years is about to be debated — the eight senators who have worked on it for months had planned to unveil it at a news conference today; they postponed the event because of Boston, but released the bill anyway.

It would compound yesterday’s tragedy if the push for desperately needed immigration reform were derailed through a deadly combination of overreaction and xenophobia. The United States was close to tackling a long-overdue overhaul of its immigration laws in 2001. President George W. Bush had discussed the issue with then-President Vicente Fox of Mexico and was planning to make it a priority. Then came 9/11 and the birth of the homeland-security state. Immigration reform — except for the border fortifications, the deportation surge and the policing crackdowns — was put off indefinitely.

Reaction update: Fox News in Boston reported that two men were escorted off a plane at Logan Airport today; they had been speaking Arabic.